The new 2013 catalog from McGraw-Hill is now available! You can find the PDF at here.

You'll also find an easy-find table of contents that will help you quickly find Direct Instruction programs in the new catalog by clicking here.

On Friday, Tony Abbott visited the Aurukun campus of the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy in western Cape York to see the impressive results the school is achieving through Direct Instruction (DI) with support from the National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI). Mr. Abbott was at the school, along with a group of senior business leaders, volunteering for a “working bee” – a sweat equity project that targeted improving the school library. But, this wasn’t the only appeal to visiting Aurukun. Abbott had the chance to see what he describes as a “transformed school” from his visit just three years earlier where DI has delivered “staggering results”.

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NIFDI's Office of Research and Evaluation has issued a review of the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) report on Reading Mastery (RM) and Learning Disabled students. As you will see in the review, the office has concluded that there was serious misrepresentation of the articles included in the study. One actually showed that students studying with RM had significantly greater gains than students in national and state norming populations. Because the gains were equal to students in Horizons (another DI program), the WWC concluded that RM had no effect. The other study involved giving an extra 45 minutes of phonics related instruction to students studying RM. The WWC interpreted the better results of the students with the extra time as indicating potentially negative effects of RM.

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By Richard E. Clark, Paul A. Kirschner, and John Sweller

Discovery learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning, constructivist learning—whatever the label, teaching that only partially guides students, and expects them to discover information on their own, is not effective or efficient. Decades of research clearly demonstrates that when teaching new information or skills, step-by-step instruction with full explanations works best.

Read the article here: Putting Students on the Path to Learning

Overview courtesy of American Federation of Teachers and American Educator.